dagblog - Comments for "I Sorted Hillary’s Email"

We closed our Kickstarter.

synchronicity — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 19:16:50 +0000

In reply to (OT for a sec ...)Synch, what

We closed our Kickstarter. In hindsight I should have just edited that post to let people know. I was just going around taking things down everywhere and rushed through it.

We decided that we are going to print the calendar next year for 2017. We had several things working against us such as my daughter getting hit by a car the day before we launched. She was not seriously injured thankfully but she was out of commission as far as contributing and being involved which created ripples with the other people working on the project and this seems to be the best course of action. We are still going to create the calendar one way or another next year.

It's kind of mandatory having a daughter who is graduating with a degree in Environmental Science having been confronted with the stark realities we face over the past few years. It just makes it impossible for me not to do as much as I can. I am for example tonight meeting with a networking group where I will be promoting a community recycle/composting party where we invite an expert to review with us what can be recycled, how we can go about getting composting services in our area, and take questions. I will use my time for that and just hand out business cards at the end. My daughter is planning to put in some effort this summer on recycling in Denver because it came to her attention that most apartment buildings in the city are not recycling.

Thanks for the support.

(OT for a sec ...)Synch, what

barefooted — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 19:02:03 +0000

In reply to Very cool article. Congrats!

(OT for a sec ...)

Synch, what happened to your post on your Kickstarter project? I was going to forward it to someone.

Very cool article. Congrats!

synchronicity — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 18:06:47 +0000

In reply to I Sorted Hillary’s Email

Very cool article. Congrats! And getting a mention on Breitbart is the end all be all. :)

"And as Michael pointed out,

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 17:18:19 +0000

In reply to As would I. And as Michael

"And as Michael pointed out, she would be well served (no pun intended) by clarifying just that. " - yes, and she should clarify that she wasn't logging on to a BBS system using a 1200 baud modem on a Commodore 64.

She had just finished a presidential campaign where presumably she had to coordinate communications via email-lists/Facebook/Twitter to millions of donors, the press, event coordinators, along with her normal Senate work and private life, but sorting a few thousand emails during her stint at State we have to check that she wasn't using 20-year-old sorting algorithms with basic logic AND/OR/XOR/NOT with no fuzzy logic/near-miss capabiity? As someone pointed out, legal search systems used every day at legal offices are far past this in capability and accuracy. Perhaps she didn't use this, but then if someone at State or the Inspector General cares, they can ask for it and it can be done in a morning.

I regularly get documents in Chinese or German

Here's a nice comment from the New Yorker site

beihai 20 hours ago

@DevilsPrinciple @beihai again, this is nonsense. Do you even use email at all? All of my email for the past 18 years is sorted by category. It just took me 2 seconds to find every email I sent one friend and received from one friend and found that they were all sorted under the category of friends. If one were misfiled it would take me a second to resort it to the proper category.

50 thousand emails are really not that much.

I must have around that many, if not more, over 18 years.

The assumption that Hillary was sitting around doing email all day is ludicrous as well. Most correspondence was probably handled by her staff, I imagine even her personal emails were mostly dictated. You seem to think it was just her clickity clacking away on her keyboard day in an day out.

Pre computer I handled filing at my old printing company. One of my jobs was to make sure everything was where it belonged. I could find one invoice for one company from 5 years previously if I needed to. And I am talking about well over 50,000 invoices. Later on when everything was computerized thousands and thousands of invoices were available in a second, just type in the company name or the invoice number and there it was.

I highly doubt she was writing to the undersecretary for Asian affairs about her daughters wedding, would you agree? You don't think she knows the email addresses of her personal friends? Do you really think her email to her cousin Helen was going to get confused with an email about the Indian PM?

First of all, how do you

Verified Atheist — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:59:24 +0000

In reply to What changed is for the

First of all, how do you think those different models work, if they're not using NLP? Secondly, have you actually used the default models on e-mails to do extensive sorting? Yes, they're better, but they're still going to get lots of false positives and false negatives. It requires a certain amount of expertise to use tools like those correctly, and even then there will be false positives and false negatives. I'm surprised you're discounting the need for intelligence in the process. And, again, don't get all hyperbolic. I'm not asking for her to self-immolate. I'm just saying that this is not an easy process (which is why I've not been calling for any persecution of her personally), and the lesson I would like to be learned is that good IT should be put into place. Why is that at all controversial?

Great article, who knew!

tmccarthy0 — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:44:21 +0000

In reply to I Sorted Hillary’s Email

Great article, who knew!

I used outlook just yesterday at work to find some info I needed. Of course I got all kinds of unrelated emails as well. I don't believe this hurts her in the long term, there have been several other cases of officials doing exactly what she did.

I guess it's that at this point Clinton is an undeclared candidate and there isn't much to talk about yet, rest assured this issue will disappear and we will move onto the next thing, whatever that is, to slam Clinton. However, she will survive and she will be President if that is what she wants to be.

What changed is for the

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:37:47 +0000

In reply to What keywords would you use

What changed is for the software to substantially include different models on its own without Michael & his boss having to discover the AND operator. It ain't that hard with 2015 software, presuming someone took it an eensy-weensy seriously, but we can wring our hands and just guess that the clock stopped in 1994 and wait for Hillary to deliver something that will gratify us. Of course having been through Rose/Whitewater and Benghazi hearings, I wouldn't be surprised if her lesson learned is that people will never be satisfied until she simply leaps off a cliff, and that's a pleasure she's not about to give them.

What keywords would you use

Verified Atheist — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 16:29:18 +0000

In reply to Please give an example of

What keywords would you use to separate private from official e-mail? Is "operation" going to be about Bill's hernia operation, or about a military operation? "Expense" and "costs" are other interesting words. There are so many ways to do this wrong, and I've witnessed several of them. You seem to think this would be simple, yet I don't see that you have any experience in exhaustively sorting e-mails (or other documents) into two piles. Genghis gave his experience - what exactly do you think has changed since his experience and now, if not for NLP? Are keywords somehow substantially different?

Please give an example of

PeraclesPlease — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 15:23:30 +0000

In reply to Decent search requires NLP.

Please give an example of what you think in a State Department email requires heavy NLP.

sure, the word "state" probably requires context - Libya/Benghazi/Baghdad/Pakistan not, nor "global warming" or "sanctions". And anything to any embassy/.gov address, a list of X foreign country domains,

Good chance "we wuz jammin w Lady Gaga for Bill's birthday" isn't going to be picked up as work-related.

Decent search requires NLP.

Verified Atheist — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 15:10:44 +0000

In reply to NLP is a red herring - just

Decent search requires NLP. Otherwise, you get either a lot of false positives or a lot of false negatives.